Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : NATO Expansion Backfired; Is Netanyahu Pushing Towards WWIII ?

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : NATO Expansion Backfired; Is Netanyahu Pushing Towards WWIII ?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Friday, September 11th, 2006, a dark day in American history about which more later. Professor Jeffrey Sacks will join us in just a moment. NATO

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Be sure to use my link in the description so that McKell knows you're a judging freedom fan. That's expatmoney.com slash judge. Professor Sachs, welcome here. Before we get to the provocation of NATO, and before we get to the revelations about what Prime Minister Netanyahu likely knew before October 7th, I must recount to you a brief conversation I had with Foreign Minister Lavrov. Now, this was a dinner in the residence.

They called the residents. You've been there. He doesn't live there, but it's a magnificent mansion in central Moscow where he receives people. In fact, as we were leaving the Saudi defense minister, and his entire entourage came up. During the course of the dinner, in which we had our neckties off, the doors were closed, and he said, ask me anything. It was very, very candid. We're having very candid conversations.

And he proceeded to condemn what's going on in Gaza and recounting his understanding of how it has diminished support for Israel in the United States. And then he said, and some of the most prominent people in the U.S. exposing the dangers of Zionism are Jewish themselves. And I said, you mean like Professor Sacks? And he stopped. And he said, he held his hand up. My dear, dear, dear, three dears friend, Jeff Sachs. Wow.

Please tell him, I miss him. So I was seated next to Larry Johnson. And the two of us beamed at that point. Wow. Well, we've known each other for more than 35 years, and he served as ambassador to the United Nations for 10 years. I've known him during his distinguished service as foreign minister. He's a remarkable person. He's the most experienced diplomat in the world today.

Yes. Well, then secondly, when I said to him at the end of the interview, which was the next day, you're going to be in New York in two weeks. can I take you to a nice Italian restaurant? What do you think he says? Only if you bring Jeff Sachs. Oh, my God. All right. We'll do it.

All right. Now, to the reasons we are here, going back into history, recent history. Yes. What provoked NATO to expand eastward? And what foolishness provoked NATO to, play footsie with Ukraine? Well, this is the core of the crisis that we're in today. NATO was created in 1949 as the U.S.-led response to the Cold War.

The Cold War is a topic in and of itself, but the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, led to the creation of two military blocks. NATO on the one side, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet-led military in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Well, we know that during the Cold War, we came close to nuclear war and possible, annihilation of our species on close calls on several occasions, the most dramatic during the Cuban missile crisis. When President Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he was a peace-seeking, a remarkable statesman, very bold. It cost him a lot. But he wanted to make peace-seeking,

and he made many unilateral moves by the Soviet Union to essentially say we are no threat, we want an end to the Cold War. And that included disbanding the Warsaw Pact. My view and the view of many people at the end of the 1980s was that NATO should be ended and the Warsaw Pact ended, and peace could be created for general.

generations to come based on the idea of what President Gorbachev called a common European home and new security architecture, especially the organization for security and cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, which had a very specific idea of inclusive security, not based on military blocks facing each other, but based on the proposition that no country should be part of any kind of security alliance that threaten any other country in Europe. The idea was end the confrontation. This was completely possible, and I know it firsthand because I was in Eastern Europe and Central Europe and Ukraine and Russia in those years at the most senior levels and with frank discussions across most of the countries. And I served as a senior advisor to Russian President Yeltsin

and to Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma. I saw this firsthand. In 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell, Germany under Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, we will reunify. Germany was divided after World War II to West Germany and East Germany, or what was called the Federal Republic

of Germany and on the east, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR. And now the Berlin Wall was ended. Gorbachev had established that there would be peace and an end to the Cold War. And the fascinating, ironic, and important part of history to understand is that there never was a treaty after the end of World War II. There was no agreement. agreement, World War II ended and the Cold War began without any formal resolution of the security arrangements in Europe at the end of World War II. And what that meant. How was Germany divided just on consensus?

Well, not at all. There were four occupying powers formally, the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. There were four units, and the idea was not that Germany would be permanently divided. The idea was that there would be a disarmed and neutral Germany after World War II. This did not happen. Instead, there was a cold war. I believe, and this is a little bit of a digression, but it is one that is worthy of the most serious discussion, I believe that the Cold War could have been avoided. I believe that the Soviet Union,

which had lost 27 million people in defeating Hitler, had dramatic, real security interests in not having a remilitarized Germany. But the United States, in my opinion, refused to countenance the idea of a neutral Germany that essentially was a neutral Germany. That essentially was a neutral and disarmed Germany. That would have been the right answer after World War II. The Soviets proposed some variant of that on multiple occasions in Potsdam in the conference in 1945, in what was called the Stalin note in 195, and in the context of Austria's neutrality in its state treaty in 1955.

On all occasions, the U.S. military and political leadership said no. And very interestingly, I believe the West chose a divided Europe rather than a neutral zone in Europe. And it was neutrality that the Soviet Union sought because they had lost 27 million people over. repeat that again, it's unimaginable to Americans. It's forgotten. It is forgotten deliberately so, I think, by the Europeans. But this is the most essential reality for understanding the Soviet and the Russian position. Well, to bring this to the context that we're discussing, Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw Pact and needed to approve German reunification because there had been no treaty to end World War II. So for Germany to reunify required formally,

as well as practically, the Soviet agreement. To get the Soviet agreement, the Germans and the Americans in the first weeks of 1990 explicitly and repeatedly said that if there is unification, NATO will not move one inch eastward. That's the famous expression of James Baker the third, our Secretary of State at the time, but the same was said by the German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher. The same was said by the German chancellor,

Helmut Kohl, to President Gorbachev, directly face-to-face on February 10, 1990. These were legally binding statements, even though they weren't written down, because as the International Court of Justice has said very clearly, statements are legally binding if countries rely on them. And if they are uttered by the senior officials, meaning the presidents or prime ministers or foreign ministers. In this case, all of that applied. So German reunification took place in the so-called two-plus-four treaty, the two germany's and the four occupying powers agreeing.

It did not specify no NATO enlargement, but the promise had been made in the context of the treaty. Well, the United States and Germany cheated. They just cheated because they deny. what I just said, but everybody can find every fact of this on the website called National Security Archive maintained by George Washington University. Everything I just stated is in documentary confirmation on that website. But what happened was the Soviet Union ended in December 1991 and that's when the so-called neocons took over in the United States. They said, we're alone, we're the sole superpower. We can do whatever we want. And in fact, in Germany and the United States,

in 1992 and 1993, they said, now it's time for NATO enlargement. It's unbelievable how they cheated directly. And Russia protested this from the start. This wasn't some incidental issue. This was core to their security, something again our officials absolutely refuse to continents, but they know it full well. We are led by liars. That's the basic point. We are led by secrecy and by lies. And so a promise that was made was broken. And that is why we have the war in Ukraine. And European leaders knew it, knew we were aiming to war. Our CIA director Burns knew we were crossing the reddest of red lines, as he said in a memo in 2008 to Condoleezza Rice.

but the security establishment went ahead in the United States and pushed NATO enlargement not just to Central Europe. The first members were Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland. And then to Russia's, closer to Russia's greatest security concerns with seven new NATO members in the year 2000. which was Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, seven countries. But then at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, they said, we're going to go to Ukraine and to Georgia. Now, people need to understand what that means.

We, NATO, which was not supposed to move one inch eastward, was going to surround Russia. Russia in the Black Sea because the idea, very clear, based on a map, was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. Now, if there's any doubt, Judge, about any of the purpose of this, it spelled out completely, explicitly, vividly by Zerner. Big New Brasinski in 1997 in two places. One is a book called The Grand Chess Board, and the other is an article called a geopolitical strategy for Eurasia or something like that in the Council, in the Foreign Affairs Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. He says in 1997, NATO will expand to Ukraine. This is a plan. This is what people need to understand. And it's a cheat. A cheat and a plan. And finally, one, and then I'll stop my point on this. The subtitle of

Brzynski's book in 1997 explains everything. The subtitle is American primacy and its geostrategic imperative. The idea has been, America will run the world. And in the book, Brzezinski says Ukraine is what he labels a geopolitical pivot. A geopolitical pivot for Brzezinski in a chessboard analogy is a piece that is strategic for you, not because you care about the peace, but because you care about what the peace can attack. So Ukraine being next to Russia is a geopolitical pivot. In other words, if I could put it in plain English, the United States is going to use Ukraine to weaken, divide, perhaps break apart Russia. And Brasinski names another geopolitical pivot just out of curiosity, Iran as a second one.

In other words, our government is very. playing games, literally. And by games, I mean the great game. Who runs the world? Not a very interesting question, because it can get us all blown up. It doesn't have anything to do with your well-being or my well-being. It's a kind of madness, but it's based on lies. The Financial Times reported yesterday, effectively what Foreign Minister Lauer, told me off the record that Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner are businessmen promenading as diplomats. They are incompetent as diplomats.

No one takes them seriously. And apparently there will soon be, here's the news hook, supplanted by John Ratcliffe, the CIA director. So the message must have made it to the the White House that his son-in-law may be a nice guy, but he's trying to cut business deals rather than have the clout with which to resolve these issues. This is a surprise? I think that there is an important issue here, again, that is very much hard to understand

for people that base their understanding on the New York Times or on the mainstream media or on the narrative of the U.S. government. We are on paper, the paper of the Constitution, and we are in rhetoric and self-description and democracy, where the American people have a say. In foreign policy, it's not like that. The American people not only have no say and oppose most of what goes on, But it's the foreign policy is not even really run by presidents and their administrations. It is run by the permanent apparatus of the CIA and to some extent the Pentagon. The CIA has big advantages for a want-to-be global hegemon. And that is that it works in secret.

it works duplicitously. As Mike Pompeo, one of the CIA directors, told a group of students, we train our officials to lie, cheat, and steal. That was literally his boast. Correct. And that's the advantage, quote unquote. It's a disaster for us. It means it's an organization that fails repeatedly that has no accountability.

at all. So whether John Radcliffe is officially or unofficially designated as the negotiator, it doesn't really matter. His organization is already of decisive importance for foreign policy, not in a good way for you and me and the American people, because what it does is done secretly. It's done very poorly, in my view, on most occasions. It's done unaccountable. It's done unaccountable. it's done very often illegally, and it's done against the will of American people and against our interests, except maybe some very narrow interests in the United States of arms contractors or other beneficiaries of a war environment. So whether he's designated as the negotiator or not, have no doubt the policy,

that led us to this war was not a choice of which party or which president. They've all been weak. All of these presidents have been weak for the last six presidents. And the security apparatus guides the policy. And to this day, this is one of the points that is bizarre. To this day, The CIA provides intelligence support and the other intelligence agencies provide support to the Ukraine military. While we are saying we're trying to find peace and mediation, we're a direct party to the war because the security state since 1992 determined that the United States will put its military and its missile systems and its CIA and everything. else wherever it wants. And that's what leads us to war and to the threat of nuclear war. So all of this idea that, you know, the American people have some say in any of this or

are told any of the truth of this is exactly the misunderstanding. And the New York Times and others I pick on the New York Times because. It's read by my neighbors, and it is worthless on these issues. Because it's been infiltrated by all of this. It repeats the official narratives rather than trying to understand what is really happening. Well, it did repeat yesterday the report in Ha Arets, claiming that Prime Minister Netanyahu was warned several days before October 6th. seven in a 45-minute phone call with the president of United Arab Emirates to expect an earthquake

from Gaza. Netanyahu, of course, denies that he received such a phone call and has threatened to sue Ha Arets. This, of course, couldn't have arrived at a worse time for Netanyahu in the midst of a re-election campaign in which he's behind in the polls. What is his next move? More than More war, more killing? You know my judgment about him is that he's the most disastrous leader, not only for Israel, but in the world in the last 30 years and has created more wars, fomented more unrest, all in pursuit of a mad kind of zealotry called Greater Israel, where Israel claims the right to slaughter Palestine.

and to invade Lebanon, to overthrow the government in Syria and occupy Syria, to attack Iran, to create war in its region for the sake in part of ethnically cleansing Palestine of its people, and for the sake of expanding its military reach. It's all despicable. It is, pulled the United States repeatedly into war, although I have to say, the U.S. quest for primacy or hegemony has its own motivation in this, so it's not only Israel that's doing it, but we've been partners in disaster in the Middle East as we are partners for Iran. So Netanyahu is a completely despicable character, period. He's led a foreign policy that has been a disaster for his country and a disaster for the United States and a disaster for the world.

But I have to keep also saying that whether he wins or loses, Israel is not getting fixed right now because the whole country is in a binge of militarism and violence and hatred that is, if not, implacable right now dominant let me just put it that way and the next government in Israel is going to be a hardline government whether it's Netanyahu or not and this is a tragedy but the choice for the United States is a different matter we need to stop partnering with this murderous approach and we need to end backing for this greater Israel project and we need to need to support a Palestinian state now. And if Israel says no Palestinian state, then we need to support one state that is binational with equal rights for the Israeli Jews and for the Palestinian

Arabs, whichever way. But we need to end this murderous state right now, or this murderous policy right now of the Israeli state, I should say, to be clear, because we have been complicit in it. And Netanyahu's been the worst. He spelled it out. This is, by the way, another point I just want to emphasize and maybe close on. These leaders have a way of telling us at the beginning what they plan to do. Netanyahu had a plan called Clean Break. with his American neocon advisors. They explained all of this, how they would make wars,

how they would overthrow governments. They put it out there. Netanyahu wrote books. They're awful, but they're worth reading because they exposed the mind of this absolutely horrible person. And Grzynski, who was a very clever person, very smart person, and was very kind to me personally, by the way, I want to say, wrote out the whole plan for,

and I'll say it again, for American primacy and how to pursue it, including NATO enlargement. He wrote it out for us. So it's not a mystery. And then our whole government narrative process is, no, don't look there. It has nothing. to do with that. When I, and again, I'm going to just end on my pet peeve. I tried to tell the New York Times editorial board for years. When you look at the NATO expansion issue, no, nothing to look at there. This is an unprovoked war. That's the game that gets us, I mean, that's the game of secrecy. That's the game of the CIA. That's the game of the permanent state. And that's why we have been in perpetual war for decades in this country.

Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Deeply appreciated. It's a lecture on history that needs to be articulated, and you always do so so beautifully. I'll see you next week, I think twice, and I look forward to it. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Thank you. All the best. Coming up later today at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Pepe Escobar,

what do we know? about the origins of 9-11. And then at 4 o'clock, at the end of the day, the end of the week, our Intelligence Community Roundtable. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.